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These sessions record a mutually painful interaction. Miss X conveys an experience of being with an object that she believes wants something from her which she does not have to give. Her therapist feels that she/he is being rejected and prevented from offering the understanding which could bring relief. Yet the patient is attached to this frustrating interchange - so we can surmise that something crucial is being lodged in the relationship with her therapist, and that she has not given up hope that communication can be achieved. Her presence refutes her claim to being contented with her solitary confinement but it may be an enactment of her belief that she is imprisoned by an unavailable object.
What ideas might her history put in our minds? She offers no information about the living members of her family nor does she speak of current relationships with friends, fellow-students, teachers etc. … There is no discernible interest in the life around her. The most lively person in her mind seems to be her dead father. His personality is presented as dominated by violence. She recalls being attacked by him and we hear of his suicide. The violence was uncontrollable and of murderous quality. He found no one to contain it and she gives no evidence of believing there was any protection available for her. This is echoed in the story of abuse by a teacher which went unreported as, I would suggest, she had no idea that anyone would hear her complaint. She seems to have resorted to placing herself at a great distance from her pain, and to have believed that this was the way in which psychic survival could be achieved. She cannot, then, afford to come closer to her emotionality, yet seems to have become aware that this sort of survival is equivalent to living suicide. Emerging from her detachment would entail a fear of encountering a violent, abusive, exciting and unreliable object.
The unnamed mother and sister suggest an early infantile experience of feeling unrecognised, named,